Enfilade

From Penn State University Press:

Rochelle Ziskin, Sheltering Art: Collecting and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012), 392 pages, ISBN: 9780271037851.

The turn of the eighteenth century was a period of transition in France, a time when new but contested concepts of modernity emerged in virtually every cultural realm. The rigidity of the state’s consolidation of the arts in the late seventeenth century yielded to a more vibrant and diverse cultural life, and Paris became, once again, the social and artistic capital of the wealthiest nation in Europe. In Sheltering Art, Rochelle Ziskin explores private art collecting, a primary facet of that newly decentralized artistic realm and one increasingly embraced by an expanding social elite as the century wore on. During the key period when Paris reclaimed its role as the nexus of cultural and social life, two rival circles of art collectors—with dissonant goals and disparate conceptions of modernity—competed for preeminence. Sheltering Art focuses on these collectors, their motivations for collecting art, and the natures of their collections. An ambitious study, it employs extensive archival research in its examination of the ideologies associated with different strategies of collecting in eighteenth-century Paris and how art collecting was inextricably linked to the shaping of social identities.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1    Cultural Geography of the French Capital Circa 1700
2    Cloistered in the Faubourg Saint-Germain
3    The Maison Crozat Transformed
4    A Circle of “Moderns”
5    The Regent and Collecting on the Right Bank
6    Les Anciens and an Expanding Public Realm in the Arts
7    The Circles Converge: Carignan and Jullienne
Conclusion
Note on the Appendixes
Appendixes
1    Maison Crozat, rue de Richelieu, in 1740
2    Hôtel de Verrue, rue du Cherche-Midi, end of 1736
3    Collections of Lériget de La Faye, Glucq de Saint-Port, and Lassay
4    Collections of Nocé and Fonspertuis
5    Hôtel de Morville, rue Plâtrière, in 1732
6    Selections from the Collection of Carignan
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

From Princeton UP:

Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 386 pages, ISBN: 9780691140667, $45.

It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste–the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics–existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period paintings, personal narratives, and diaries, Simon Gikandi illustrates how the violence and ugliness of enslavement actually shaped theories of taste, notions of beauty, and practices of high culture, and how slavery’s impurity informed and haunted the rarified customs of the time.

Gikandi focuses on the ways that the enslavement of Africans and the profits derived from this exploitation enabled the moment of taste in European–mainly British–life, leading to a transformation of bourgeois ideas regarding freedom and selfhood. He explores how these connections played out in the immense fortunes made in the West Indies sugar colonies, supporting the lavish lives of English barons and altering the ideals that defined middle-class subjects. Discussing how the ownership of slaves turned the American planter class into a new aristocracy, Gikandi engages with the slaves’ own response to the strange interplay of modern notions of freedom and the realities of bondage, and he emphasizes the aesthetic and cultural processes developed by slaves to create spaces of freedom outside the regimen of enforced labor and truncated leisure.

Through a close look at the eighteenth century’s many remarkable documents and artworks, Slavery and the Culture of Taste sets forth the tensions and contradictions entangling a brutal practice and the distinctions of civility.

Simon Gikandi is the Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University.

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